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Not at all. Marxism is a method of analyzing history and the present through the lens of class conflict. Generally "Marxism" is thrown around as a boogie man

Not at all. Marxism is a method of analyzing history and the present through the lens of class conflict. Generally "Marxism" is thrown around as a boogie man term by people with little understanding for something approximating extreme authoritarianism in which the state owns all the means of production and allocates everyone the same resources.

jhgb 5y ago
It's not "a boogie [sic] man". Marxist governments were definitely not "analyzing history", they were enacting government policies. That's what governments do, unsurprisingly. (Source: I grew up in a Marxist country and was taught Marxism by a Marxist teacher.)
- rjbwork 5y ago
  You're probably thinking of Marxism-Leninism, though it's hard to know without knowing what country you're talking about. I'm not even sure what a "Marxist" country could possibly entail. They'd dedicate all resources to analyzing society through the lens of historical materialism?
  - jhgb 5y ago
    You surely won't be surprised if I tell you that Marxism-Leninism embeds the ideas of Marx about stages of societal development. Also, no; most prominently, we largely dedicated our resources to pointless heavy industry at the expense of light industry and services.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism. The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries. If you're talking about the USSR, there was actually some dissension after the death of Lenin on whether light industry or heavy industry should be focused on. Lenin wanted to focus especially on neither, with his NEP that would create a temporary market economy to figure that out on it's own. Eventually, the decision was taken to focus on heavy industry. The decisive arguments for a focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxian economics - those arguments went either way. The main determinant of the Soviet focus on heavy industry was the failure of Stalin to obtain security assurances from Western Europe, leading to a focus on heavy industry for military purposes. At least in the 20s this was a solid move, because Soviet heavy industry saved tens of millions of lives by stalling the Nazi offensive, whose plan was to kill 50% of the Soviet population (something very bad). After the end of WW2 however, it was pointless in retrospect to continue the focus on heavy industry. But the Soviet Union did not really calculate the geopolitcal impact of nuclear weapons and built a military that could rival NATO, and this required a lot of heavy industry. Pretty much, Marxism had nothing to do with Soviet investment in heavy industry. The main reason was to feed the Soviet war machine, from the very beginning.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        > Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism. If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human. > The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries. I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        >If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human. I don't see the incompatibility. Lenin used Marxism, a method of analyzing history, to derive a political program for the Russian empire. Not everything that the Soviet Union did was done because of Marxism Leninism - the vast majority was done out of practical considerations, outside of the general guidelines. >I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain. You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union. I explained to you why this focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxism, and everything to do with the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. I gave an explanation that was valid from death of Lenin to the end of the Cold War. It seems to me that my thesis that the Soviet government wasn't a "Marxist government" but rather a government whose political program was initially based partly on a Marxist analysis of history, but were many of the fatal decisions and errors had nothing to do with Marxism.
        5y ago

jhgb 5y ago

It's not "a boogie [sic] man". Marxist governments were definitely not "analyzing history", they were enacting government policies. That's what governments do, unsurprisingly. (Source: I grew up in a Marxist country and was taught Marxism by a Marxist teacher.)

rjbwork 5y ago
You're probably thinking of Marxism-Leninism, though it's hard to know without knowing what country you're talking about. I'm not even sure what a "Marxist" country could possibly entail. They'd dedicate all resources to analyzing society through the lens of historical materialism?
- jhgb 5y ago
  You surely won't be surprised if I tell you that Marxism-Leninism embeds the ideas of Marx about stages of societal development. Also, no; most prominently, we largely dedicated our resources to pointless heavy industry at the expense of light industry and services.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism. The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries. If you're talking about the USSR, there was actually some dissension after the death of Lenin on whether light industry or heavy industry should be focused on. Lenin wanted to focus especially on neither, with his NEP that would create a temporary market economy to figure that out on it's own. Eventually, the decision was taken to focus on heavy industry. The decisive arguments for a focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxian economics - those arguments went either way. The main determinant of the Soviet focus on heavy industry was the failure of Stalin to obtain security assurances from Western Europe, leading to a focus on heavy industry for military purposes. At least in the 20s this was a solid move, because Soviet heavy industry saved tens of millions of lives by stalling the Nazi offensive, whose plan was to kill 50% of the Soviet population (something very bad). After the end of WW2 however, it was pointless in retrospect to continue the focus on heavy industry. But the Soviet Union did not really calculate the geopolitcal impact of nuclear weapons and built a military that could rival NATO, and this required a lot of heavy industry. Pretty much, Marxism had nothing to do with Soviet investment in heavy industry. The main reason was to feed the Soviet war machine, from the very beginning.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      > Marxism-Leninism is a strict subset of Marxism. If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human. > The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries. I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        >If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human. I don't see the incompatibility. Lenin used Marxism, a method of analyzing history, to derive a political program for the Russian empire. Not everything that the Soviet Union did was done because of Marxism Leninism - the vast majority was done out of practical considerations, outside of the general guidelines. >I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain. You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union. I explained to you why this focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxism, and everything to do with the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. I gave an explanation that was valid from death of Lenin to the end of the Cold War. It seems to me that my thesis that the Soviet government wasn't a "Marxist government" but rather a government whose political program was initially based partly on a Marxist analysis of history, but were many of the fatal decisions and errors had nothing to do with Marxism.
        5y ago